Finally!

One of the most requested features for Google’s RSS Reader is probably search functionality. I complained about it a few months ago, and someone must have listened!

It’s very simple, and I question if it’s fully deployed to all users yet… however it is very functional. I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent digging through past feeds, searching Google Blog Search (to no avail), trying to find some interesting article I read weeks ago…. this feature is long overdue.

Now I can say without reservation in my opinion, Google RSS Reader is the best feed reader online.

I normally don’t track search engine trends or new product releases/updates… however to me, this is important. :p

Edit: Found the official Google post.

I use almost all of Google’s products, but there are a few things, that if added, would make my life much easier. Additionally, I’ve included some of my “I wish Google would make…” items.

1. An already heavily requested feature… search within Google Reader. I read almost a hundred RSS feeds a day, and often times I’m wishing I could find a story I skimmed over again to show a friend… but it’s quite difficult.
2. Adsense integration with Google Analytics. I don’t use PPC campaigns so Adwords is useless to me, however I would be VERY interested in tracking my earnings with the ability to drill down to a page level. Google Analytics is a great, powerful system, and Adwords integration would be a nice touch.
3. Google Gears integration with Gmail. I love Gmail, but I find myself often wishing I could access it offline. I’ve setup Outlook (POP downloads) setup on my laptop, but I really don’t like the feel of it nearly as much as the Gmail web interface.
4. Google Gears integration with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. It would be great to simply have a link icon on my desktop that opened Google Docs, and no matter where I am (home, Starbucks, on a plane, etc.), I can always work on my documents whenever I’d like.
5. GDrive. I’d love an XDrive-style storage system run by G, where I can quickly toss any files I’d like, from MP3s to EXEs. Also knowing Google, I’m sure they’d be generous with space as well.
6. GoogOS. Okay, maybe I’m getting a bit far out now, but I’d LOVE a simple AJAX web interface with icons where I can open Google applications in smaller Meebo-style draggable CSS/JS windows. I would like a site I can go to, hit F11 to make it full screen, and no matter what computer I’m on, have access to everything in single one place.
7. Google Music Identifier. All the cell companies are doing it now (Cingular, Verizon’s V Cast Phone, etc)…. it’d be awesome if Google made a 1-800 number I could call, hold my phone up in a store or in my car, and have Google identify the artist and song for me. Bonus points if they automatically add a link to that Google Music page to my Google Notebook.
8. Google Accounting. Most of my daily operations are handed with Google’s systems (email, word processing, chat, search, etc)… but I’m still using QuickBooks to manage my finances. I’m sure they could easily create an easy-to-use personal expense tracking system, and even tie it into Google Checkout. I’d definitely use it.
9. Expand Google Blog Search to add trends and popularity. Without much work, they could become a direct competitor of Technorati and finally give them a run for their money. Google Blog Search is very bland and underdeveloped right now in my opinion. A little dedication to it would do wonders.
10. Folders in Gmail. I understand Google’s ideas for labeling emails and archiving… but I still like folders better… just drag emails and drop them in the right place. Very intuitive. I think this is one of the only flaws in Gmail and would be a radical (they seem hard-set on labels), but progressive modification.

Thanks G… if I could get these all done in the next few days, that’d be great. :p

At what point does a site get too powerful?

I spent a good amount of time with Digg because it’s a great source for backlinks. Sure, I don’t make any money off this blog, but rather use it for experiments and giving back to the community. I occasionally post tutorials or reviews, building a small reader base and gaining decent weight in search engines, which becomes invaluable when I launch new products such as Desktop Nexus.

Most of my backlinks come from articles on Digg, but at what point does a supersite like Digg become too powerful? When does it gain wikipedia-like velocity, where no matter what happens, there’s no end in sight. I recently had an article hit homepage about Ubuntu Wallpapers, which received over 500 diggs. The problem, however, is after Google updated and reshuffled it’s results, the Digg article was crowned in the top space for ‘ubuntu wallpapers’ and number two (below) for ‘ubuntu wallpaper’, with my site below it at number five:

So Digg, receiving all it’s content from the community, has achieved such mass in search engines, that they themselves rank higher than the sites they promote. Should Google make adjustments to it’s algorithms, allowing less heavy sites to rank higher, based on the link structure? If a page has 50 backlinks, all pointing to it with no outgoing links from it (ie, no link exchanges), how can Google’s logic place one of the backlinks higher than the page being promoted? Common sense dictates that looking at a link structure such as that, Google should be able to decide which page is the source, and which are references.

However I’m tearing on Google mostly because they’re my main source of traffic, however Yahoo is even worse. Yahoo ranks both the Digg article and the DuggMirror on page one, but my site doesn’t come up at all in the first 10 pages. MSN, being clueless as usual, doesn’t rank the Digg article or my site at all.

Google is a great search engines, the best online today in my opinion, however I believe they’re over-tweaking their results. They’re degrading their overall quality by watering down the accuracy to help filter out spam.

Anyone else have any examples like this?

Google is famous for their light-hearted attitude in an often boring corporate world. They regularly slip small easter eggs in their systems, like the Pi Symbol in Google Personalized Homepage, or an actual answer when you search for answer to life, the universe, and everything (if you don’t know, don’t ask)… however here’s another one in Google Maps I’d never seen before.

1. Head over to maps.google.com.
2. Click on “Get directions”
3. For the first textbox (where you’re coming from), enter “New York, NY”.
4. In the 2nd textbox (destination), enter “Paris, France”.

You’ll notice the map looks a little…. well, take a look for yourself (screenshot):

Then if you scroll down on the directions, take a look at number 23:

Oh Google, you’re so silly.

- Thanks to my amazing girlfriend Laura for pointing this out to me. I’m the computer guy, and she’s still showing me things on the internet I’ve never seen before.

Google just announced in an official press release that their OneBox server is now going beyond simply searching corporate documents and fully integrating with some major industry players such as Cisco, NetSuite, Oracle, SAS, and Salesforce.com. This means an employee of a Salesforce-enabled company can use the Google search engine architecture (usually over their intranet) to accurately find that tiny, yet important, piece of information noted in a phone log attached to a lead made 5 years ago. Google’s already dominated the consumer internet experience, now it’s moving even farther into the corporate and B2B territory.

Source Link

I just got into an SEO discussion about someone’s site who was banned by Google. Looking back over it, my last reply might be helpful to others, so I decided to post it here.

Q. Help! All my traffic from Google has stopped and I lost my Pagerank. Am I banned or penalized?

A.
If you’ve lost 100% of your traffic (not a single hit from Google), and you’ve lost your Pagerank, you’re not penalized (and sandboxed)… you’re banned. If you’re still unsure, later in this article I give a way to test without a doubt if you’re banned or penalized.

Google has various levels of punishment, based on your offense. If they think it’s innocent or accidental, they penalize you. If they think you did it on purpose trying to cheat the system, they ban you.

Now the bad news. After a website is banned from Google it’s removed from the index completely and will never be readded. Penalized sites are still in the index, but much lower in the result pages. There is no appeal process for a banned or penalized site (it’s not a judicial system- if Google giveith, Google can also taketh away).

Now, no one is completely sure how Google functions. They only publish some of their inner-workings, and the rest are still secret. A domain that is issued a ban by Google will never be reincluded in the index again as long as it’s registered, however there is speculation that if a domain is not renewed, and a period of X months or years pass, a new person registering the domain will not suffer the same penalty (ie, the ban on that domain is lifted), however that doesn’t help you much. Also there’s speculation that Google does not just ban the domain, but also the entire IP address, however I have my personal doubts about this because of shared hosting, however I could see them watching it more closely.

You can check to see if your domain is banned from the Google index by searching for your entire domain as a query, and if it had PR at any point in time (even 0), it will always return. If there are no results, but you’ve been in Google before, they didn’t forget about you… you’ve been banned. Check your site here: Google Link

On that note, I’d recommend what I said above. Cut your losses, gather your content (except what caused you to be banned, usually material that tries to manipulate or fool Googlebot’s keyword detection), register a brand new domain name, and begin building again. Another point though, is before I recommended setting up a 301 redirection on your old domain, and while it is still needed for other search engines, it will do nothing with Google. When Googlebot is crawling another site and sees a link to your old domain, it won’t even bother following it (to get the redirect), because it’ll realize that domain is banned and stop right there… so in Google, you WILL lose all your backlinks when you setup your new site. There is no way to avoid this, except tracing as many of the high PR links as you can find, and emailing the webmasters asking them to change where their link is pointing to. However don’t get me wrong, if you do not setup the 301 redirect, the other search engines will be confused as well and you’ll also lose their traffic (so do it).

Sorry about this, but hopefully you understand the situation now and can begin rebuilding to get back on your feet as quickly as possible. Good luck with everything!

Other Helpful Replies in the Discussion

Earlier in the conversation, they thought their website was simply penalized. Here was my reply on sandboxing and penalties:

Sorry to hear about that. Average penalized site takes about 6 months to come out of the sandbox. Granted some are less, but some are also more.

I’d actually recommend grabbing a different domain, copying over your content, and begin rebranding. Setup a 301 permanent redirect on your domain so you still retain credit for all your links and it bleeds PR, but you have a clean name to work with.

Good luck!

And they asked “that would be if it was a new domain right ? . . less than 2 years registered”, so I clarify the “new domain sandbox” confusion:

No, the sandbox has nothing to do with a new domain.

When a website gets penalized for some reason, it goes to the sandbox where it comes up lower on the SERPs.

When a domain is new, it simply does not have pagerank. It can go to PR5 the next week with enough inbound links, but a penalized site in the sandbox cannot get PR again (and high placement in SERPs) until the penality is lifted.

Hope that helped!

I just noticed a pagerank (a website’s ranking of importance, in Google’s eyes) shift. Car-wallpapers.net just went from a PR0 to PR2, and hot-car-sites went from PR0 to PR4! That’s double United Bimmer’s PR2 ranking, and HCS has only been online for a few weeks, as compared to UB life of well over a year!

I just (finally) received my invite to join Google Analytics.

It’s now running on a few sites, including United Bimmer.